Publicly placed stickers with printed images and/or text have been used for decades as a form of political protest or to advocate political agendas. In the United States as early as the mid-1910s, for example, labor unions created the first “stickerettes,” or “silent agitators,” to oppose poor working conditions, intimidate bosses, and condemn capitalism. Later, during World War II, Allied and Axis countries dropped gummed “paper bullets” or “confetti soldiers” from the sky as a form of psychological warfare to demoralize both troops and civilians. And during the 1960s and ’70s American civil rights era, “night raiders” protested the war in Vietnam and U.S. imperialism, and called for racial and gender equity among blacks, whites, men, and women.

Drawing from the private collection of Catherine Tedford, the exhibition highlights political stickers from Canada, Egypt, England, Germany, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States dating from the early 20th century to present day. Topics include labor, animal rights, the environment, gender and sexuality, football, consumer capitalism, surveillance, and police brutality.

Political stickers in the exhibition support Catalan independence, for example, while others document the Arab Spring uprisings, Maidan protests in Ukraine, and the global Occupy revolution. Political stickers also comment upon the U.S. war in Vietnam, recent Russian elections, the current economic crisis in Spain, and the effects of urban development in Berlin, Germany. The exhibition also features stickers that focus on U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Catherine Tedford is gallery director at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. She first discovered street art stickers while visiting Berlin in 2003 and has since collected over 10,000 examples from countries around the world. She writes about political stickers on her research blog Stickerkitty and has presented papers at academic conferences in England, Germany, Scotland and the United States. She has collaborated with Hatch Kingdom on two previous exhibitions of street art stickers in Canada and the United States. This is her first sticker exhibition in Europe.

The exhibition is supported by a faculty research grant from St. Lawrence University.